CHB 2014-12 Volume 41

A cross-sectional study of a large, middle-school student sample (N = 966)
was presented in this paper aiming to examine how parental behavior and
self-control influence Internet addiction (IA) among Chinese adolescents.
Fifty-one adolescents (the top 5% of IA score distribution) were categorized as
at high risk. Males were more likely addicted to Internet than females. MANOVA
demonstrated that, compared with non-IA group, adolescents with IA revealed
lower mean score for parental positive support behavior and higher for parental
negative control behavior and had lower capacity of self-control. SEM analyses
revealed that low capacity of self-control had a negative correlation with
parents' positive support and a positive correlation with negative control.
More importantly, Internet addiction was explained negatively by parents'
positive support and positively by parents' negative control and individual low
capacity of self-control. Further mediating analyses indicated that
self-control accounted for an indirect role between parental behavior and
adolescents' Internet addiction. The findings of the present study are of
significance in investigating adolescents' problem behaviors and very helpful
to provide educational advice for intervening in these behaviors. Moreover, the
present finding's potential relevance to Confucian styles of filial parenting
was discussed.

Experimental evidence has pointed toward a negative effect of violent video
games on social behavior. Given that the availability and presence of video
games is pervasive, negative effects from playing them have potentially large
implications for public policy. It is, therefore, important that violent video
game effects are thoroughly and experimentally explored, with the current
experiment focusing on prosocial behavior. 120 undergraduate volunteers (Mage =
19.01, 87.5% male) played an ultra-violent, violent, or non-violent video game
and were then assessed on two distinct measures of prosocial behavior: how much
they donated to a charity and how difficult they set a task for an ostensible
participant. It was hypothesized that participants playing the ultra-violent
games would show the least prosocial behavior and those playing the non-violent
game would show the most. These hypotheses were not supported, with
participants responding in similar ways, regardless of the type of game played.
While null effects are difficult to interpret, samples of this nature
(undergraduate volunteers, high male skew) may be problematic, and participants
were possibly sensitive to the hypothesis at some level, this experiment adds
to the growing body of evidence suggesting that violent video game effects are
less clear than initially thought.

Cyberbullying is a growing phenomenon in our society with the technological
advances that are occurring. This type of bullying can transpire at all hours
via text message, email, or social networking sites. According to several
studies, college students are being affected by cyberbullying, with prevalence
rates ranging from 8% to 21%. Many psychological ramifications exist as a
result of cyberbullying among victims and bullies. It is crucial to learn more
about how this phenomenon is affecting the social and learning environments in
college, as well as how college students view cyberbullying. First and
second-year students at a southern university were recruited to participate in
this qualitative study. The researchers conducted six focus groups with 54
students. The participants reported reasons for cyberbullying in the college
environment, such as retaliation in relationships. Independence and autonomy
were discussed as reasons why college students do not report cyberbullying to
others when it occurs. Participants discussed future interventions to reduce
cyberbullying that included coping strategies, utilizing university services,
and engaging in legal action. The authors recommend utilizing a multi-level
Socio-Ecological approach to reduce cyberbullying rates. Additionally,
evaluation research needs to be conducted on what works and what does not in
the prevention of cyberbullying.

This study uses eye tracking technology to examine how study aids such as
highlighting and graphic organizers affect cognitive processing during
learning. Participants were 130 college students randomly assigned to one of
five experimental conditions. In the control group, students read a plain text;
in two behaviorally passive conditions, students read a text with key words
colored in red or read the same text along with a filled-in graphic organizer;
and in two behaviorally active conditions, students either highlighted key
words in a text or filled in an empty graphic organizer. Students took tests of
rote memory (cloze test) and comprehension (summary test). Asking students to
fill in a graphic organizer or providing a filled-in graphic organizer resulted
in improvements in performance on both tests, whereas asking students to
highlight the text or providing highlighted text improved performance only in
the rote memory test compared to students who did not receive any study aids.
Eye tracking measures showed that highlighting (in both conditions) primed the
cognitive process of selecting: students spent more time fixating on those
words colored in red compared with the control condition. In contrast, eye
tracking measures showed that graphic organizers (in both conditions) primed
the cognitive processes of selecting, organizing and integrating since the
inclusion of an organizer substantially affected both where their eyes fixated
and moved (i.e. transitions) within the text.

Social networking sites (SNS) provide opportunities for mood management
through selective exposure. This study tested the prediction that negative mood
fosters self-enhancing social comparisons to SNS profiles. Participants were
induced into positive or negative moods and then browsed manipulated profiles
on an experimental SNS. Profiles varied in a 2 × 2 within-subjects design
along two dimensions, ratings of career success and attractiveness, allowing
for upward comparisons (high ratings) and downward comparisons (low ratings).
Selective exposure was measured in seconds spent viewing profiles. Negative
mood led to less exposure to upward comparisons and more to downward
comparisons than positive mood. The comparison dimension did not influence
selective exposure. Thus, in a negative mood, SNS users prefer self-enhancing
social comparisons to manage their mood.

Recently with widely available access, the web has emerged as a medium for
new interventions. However, as yet, little is known about what makes some
websites more effective than others. This study investigated an approach to
developing websites that utilized two media characteristics -- media richness
and interactivity -- to promote physical activity among college students. Four
forms of websites were developed and tested in a 2 × 2 between-subject
experiment (high vs. low richness; high vs. low interactivity) that was
conducted among 205 participants. Overall, media richness had a significant
main effect on college students' intention to visit the fitness center while
interactivity influenced the likelihood they would recommend it. Although media
richness did not have a significant main effect on recommendation, a
significant interaction effect was observed that rich media led to higher
recommendation intention when interactivity level was low. In addition,
knowledge, attitude and trustworthiness of the fitness center mediated the
effects of media richness and interactivity on behavioral intentions. These
findings support the efficacy of utilizing these media characteristics to
design web-based health interventions promoting college students' physical
activity.

Programming is more than just coding, for, it exposes students to
computational thinking which involves problem-solving using computer science
concepts like abstraction and decomposition. Even for non-computing majors,
computational thinking is applicable and useful in their daily lives. The three
dimensions of computational thinking are computational concepts, computational
practices and computational perspectives. In recent years, the availability of
free and user-friendly programming languages has fuelled the interest of
researchers and educators to explore how computational thinking can be
introduced in K-12 contexts. Through an analysis of 27 available intervention
studies, this paper presents the current trends of empirical research in the
development of computational thinking through programming and suggests possible
research and instructional implications. From the review, we propose that more
K-12 intervention studies centering on computational practices and
computational perspectives could be conducted in the regular classroom. To
better examine these two dimensions, students could be asked to verbalize their
thought process using think aloud protocol while programming and their
on-screen programming activity could be captured and analyzed. Predetermined
categories based on both past and recent programming studies could be used to
guide the analysis of the qualitative data. As for the instructional
implication, it is proposed that a constructionism-based problem-solving
learning environment, with information processing, scaffolding and reflection
activities, could be designed to foster computational practices and
computational perspectives.

Self-regulative behaviors are dynamic and evolve as a function of time and
context. However, dynamical fluctuations in behaviors are often difficult to
measure and therefore may not be fully captured by traditional measures alone.
Utilizing system log data and two novel statistical methodologies, this study
examined emergent patterns of controlled and regulated behaviors and assessed
how variations in these patterns related to individual differences in prior
literacy ability and target skill acquisition. Conditional probabilities and
Entropy analyses were used to examine nuanced patterns manifested in students'
interaction choices within a computer-based learning environment. Forty high
school students interacted with the game-based intelligent tutoring system
iSTART-ME, for a total of 11 sessions (pretest, 8 training sessions, posttest,
and a delayed retention test). Results revealed that high and low reading
ability students differed in their patterns of interactions and the amount of
control they exhibited within the game-based system. However, these differences
converged overtime along with differences in students' performance within
iSTART-ME. The findings from this study indicate that individual differences in
students' prior reading ability relate to the emergence of controlled and
regulated behaviors during learning tasks.

Internet users face large numbers of security warnings, which they mostly
ignore. To improve risk communication, warnings must be fewer but better. We
report an experiment on whether compliance can be increased by using some of
the social-psychological techniques the scammers themselves use, namely appeal
to authority, social compliance, concrete threats and vague threats. We also
investigated whether users turned off browser malware warnings (or would have,
had they known how).

Keywords: Malware; Persuasion; Human computer interaction; Psychology

Comparing the effects of worked examples and modeling examples on learning

Example-based learning is an effective instructional strategy for students
with low prior knowledge, and is increasingly being used in online learning
environments. However, examples can take many different forms and little is
known about whether and how form affects learning outcomes. Therefore, this
study investigated whether worked examples and modeling examples with and
without a visible model would be equally effective in fostering learning of a
problem-solving task. In Experiment 1, secondary education students (N = 78)
learned how to solve a probability calculation problem by watching two videos
that, depending on the assigned condition, provided worked examples (written
text, pictures of problem states), modeling examples with a visible model
(spoken text, a demonstration of the task), or modeling examples without a
visible model (spoken text, pictures of problem states). Results showed that
all three conditions were equally effective at fostering learning, near
transfer, effort reduction, self-efficacy, and perceived competence. Experiment
2 (N = 134) replicated these results with a younger student population that
only studied one example. These findings suggest that the format of examples
does not affect learning outcomes for this task; future research should
investigate whether this would generalize to other problem-solving tasks.

Natural language processing is related to human-computer interaction, where
several challenges involve natural language understanding. Word sense
disambiguation problem consists in the computational assignment of a meaning to
a word according to a particular context in which it occurs. Many natural
language processing applications, such as machine translation, information
retrieval, and information extraction, require this task which occurs at the
semantic level. Evolutionary computation approaches can be effective to solve
this problem since they have been successfully used for many real-world
optimization problems. In this paper, we propose to solve the word sense
disambiguation problem using genetic and memetic algorithms, and apply them to
Modern Standard Arabic. We demonstrate the performance of several models of our
algorithms by carrying out experiments on a large Arabic corpus, and comparing
them against a naïve Bayes classifier. Experimental results show that
genetic algorithms can achieve more precise prediction than memetic algorithms
and naïve Bayes classifier, attaining 79%.

WeChat is a mobile instant text and voice messaging communication service
and has become an important social media platform in China. The objectives of
this article are to examine the effects of psychological motivations
(entertainment, sociality, and information) and trust on WeChat users'
attitudes and to assess the influence of users' attitudes and their trust on
positive word-of-mouth. This study represents one of the few that empirically
investigates WeChat users' motives, attitudes, trust, and their associated
behavior. The research model was tested using data randomly collected from the
database of Sojump. The numbers of valid observations were 264. Structure
equation modeling was employed to verify and validate the research model. The
outcomes confirm the path effects showing that entertainment, sociality,
information, and trust positively influence WeChat users' attitudes and users'
trust and their attitudes significantly affect positive WOM. The research
results provide insight into how WeChat can motivate users and build their
trust to improve their attitudes which in turn will increase WeChat users'
willingness in making positive comments on products and services.

We investigated the conjoint effect of screen luminance and ambient
illuminance on visual fatigue and arousal during prolonged digital reading (one
hour) by means of a multidimensional approach based on eye, performance and
subjective measures. Two levels of screen luminance (low, high) and two levels
of ambient illuminance (low, high) were tested in a 2 × 2
between-subjects design in which participants were arbitrarily allocated to
four groups, one for each combined level of luminance and illuminance. Results
showed that reading under high levels of screen luminance increases visual
fatigue, as reflected by a decrease of eye blinks. Concerning arousal, exposure
to higher levels of either luminance or illuminance increased alertness and
performance. Faster saccades, increased reading speed and less microsaccades
were found under high screen luminance. Fewer regressive saccades and shorter
reaction times were observed under high ambient illuminance. However, the
reason why some of these measures are sensitive to screen luminance while other
to ambient illuminance remains unknown. These findings might have practical
implications for the implementation of adaptive brightness solutions and for
the online detection of both visual fatigue and arousal levels during digital
reading.

Procrastination is a very common problem among students that results from
ineffective self-regulation. In two field-experimental studies (N = 18 and N =
49), we investigated whether visual feedback on students' previous
procrastination was effective in provoking a decrease in students' future
procrastination as well as improvements in self-regulated learning. The visual
feedback was implemented as a dynamic line chart in a web-based planning and
reflection protocol used once a week by medical students to record their class
preparation and homework once a week. In the protocols, the students planned
and reflected on their personal learning processes and they estimated
retrospectively their inclination to procrastinate. The results of both studies
consistently showed that presenting students a line chart that adaptively
visualizes the course and extent of their self-reported previous
procrastination led to a statistically significant and practically relevant
decrease in their future procrastination. Furthermore, the visualization had
positive effects on other variables central to self-regulated learning. The
studies provide converging evidence that the inclination to procrastinate can
successfully be counteracted both by a parsimonious and easy-to-implement
method. They are suggestive of ways how Internet technology can be used support
students' self-regulated learning.

The key focus in this article study is to examine the association between
online harassment and exposure to websites related to self-harm or negative
self-image, along with several other independent variables. Our data were
collected from two countries, the U.S. and Finland, thus providing a chance for
a cross-national comparison regarding these associations. According to the
results, significant association between online harassment and most notably
exposure to websites relating to eating disorders was found. Furthermore,
subjective wellbeing (SWB), age and gender were significantly associated with
online harassment. There were only minor differences between U.S. and Finland,
indicating certain levels of cultural homogenization regarding the online
space.

The present paper examines the extent to which self-presentation may be
affected by the context in which is it undertaken. Individuals were asked to
complete the Twenty Statements Test both privately and publicly, but were given
an opportunity to withhold any of their personal information before it was made
public. Four contexts were examined: an offline context (face-to-face), an
un-contextualized general online context, or two specific online contexts
(dating or job-seeking). The results suggested that participants were willing
to disclose substantially less personal information online than offline.
Moreover, disclosure decreased as the online context became more specific, and
those in the job-seeking context disclosed the least amount of information.
Surprisingly, individual differences in personality did not predict disclosure
behavior. Instead, the results are set in the context of audience visibility
and social norms, and implications for self-presentation in digital contexts
are discussed.

The main objective of our study is to (1) empirically investigate the
factors that affect the acceptance and use of e-learning in Lebanon, and (2)
investigate the role of a set of individual differences as moderators (e.g.,
age, gender, experience, educational level) in an extended Technology
Acceptance Model (TAM). A quantitative methodology approach was adopted in this
study. To test the hypothesized research model, data was collected from 569
undergraduate and postgraduate students studying in Lebanon via questionnaire.
The collected data were analysed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM)
technique based on AMOS methods in conjunction with multi-group analysis. The
result revealed that perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU),
subjective norms (SN) and Quality of Work Life (QWL) positively affect
students' behavioural intention (BI). We also found that experience moderates
the relationship between PEOU, PU and SN on e-learning use intention, and that
age difference moderates the effects of PEOU, SN and QWL on BI. In addition,
educational level moderates the effects of PEOU, SN on BI, and gender moderates
the effects of PU, SN and QWL on BI. Contrary to expectations, a moderating
role of age on the relationship between PU and BI was not found. Similarly,
gender was not found to affect the relationship between PEOU and BI, and
educational level did not moderate the relationship between PU or QWL and BI.
In light of these findings, implications to both theory and practice are
discussed.

Unemployment is an unfortunate reality, whose overcoming often depends on
social support, among other factors. Online social media, such as social
network sites and communities, may offer an additional source of such support
for unemployed people. This paper posits that online social support plays an
important role in unemployed people's ability to cope with unemployment and
search for new employment. The paper develops and tests a structural equation
model of the influence of online-mediated, enabling and caring social support
on job search self-efficacy, which may foster the job search behaviour of
unemployed persons. In addition, we control for gender, age, user experience,
and attitude towards the Internet. Based on 1322 telephone interviews with
unemployed individuals in Germany, we find that online social support drives
job search behaviour. Our results show that social support derived from new
information and communication technology counteracts the adverse effect of
being unemployed to a certain degree. Enabling support and caring support
experienced through social media both lead to higher job search self-efficacy,
which, in turn, fosters job search behaviour. Furthermore, our model shows that
these relationships differ by gender, age, user experience, and attitude
towards the Internet.

Keywords: Unemployment; Social media; Social support; Self-efficacy

The sending and receiving of sexually explicit cell phone photos ("Sexting")
while in high school: One college's students' retrospective reports

The sending and receiving of sexually explicit photographs via cell phone,
sexting has received much publicity in the popular media and increasing
attention in the scientific literature. The research is being fueled, in part,
by the several potentially problematic psychosocial and legal consequences of
sexting, particularly when the person pictured in the photograph is a minor.
Despite the surveys (those published in peer-reviewed journals and elsewhere)
that have been conducted, their methodological limits have left us without a
clear sense of even how many male and female teens are sending, receiving, and
forwarding these sexually explicit photos via cell phone. The present study
surveyed over 1100 undergraduate students from a single university regarding
their experience with sexting while in high school. Results revealed that over
19% of the students reported having sent nude picture of themselves to others
via cell phone (i.e., sexting), over 38% reported having received such a
picture from someone else, and nearly 7% admitted to having forwarded such a
picture to one or more others. Sex differences regarding sexting as well as its
targets and its relationship to religiosity were also explored.

Keywords: Sexting; Explicit cell phone pictures; Adolescents

Professional or interactive: CEOs' image strategies in the microblogging
context

Microblogging platforms are gaining popularity among corporations and their
top management in recent years. Although microblogging services like Twitter
and Sina Weibo are now prevalently used for managing CEOs' images and public
relations, few studies have examined the effects of these practices on the
loyalty of target audiences. This study examined the effect of CEO image
strategy on follower loyalty in the microblogging context. Based on the
self-presentation theory, four types of CEO image strategies were identified,
namely the Expert, Friend, Textbook, and Daybook strategies. These categories
were identified based on the levels of interactivity and professionalism of the
CEOs on their microblogs. An online survey was used to collect data from
microblog users, that is, the CEOs' followers. The results showed that CEO
image strategy influences follower loyalty in the microblogging context and
that Chinese microblog users are fondest of CEOs who present themselves as
experts rather than as friends (H1). The results also showed that usage
orientation moderates the effect of CEO image on follower loyalty (H2) and that
goal orientation positively influences CEOs with a highly professional image.

Internet addiction is a recently recognized disorder which has received
increasing attention worldwide over the past two decades. This focus has led to
the development of several screening tools measuring different aspects of
Internet use, and more particularly Internet addiction. However, a synthesis of
the information regarding the validity and usefulness of these different scales
is lacking and would help inform researchers and clinicians in their choice of
measures when assessing for Internet addiction. The main goal of this study was
therefore to identify all the existing measures of Internet addiction and to
review the psychometric properties of the most frequently used ones. Five
electronic databases were searched using the key words: internet use disorder,
Internet addiction, problematic internet use, pathologic internet use, cyber
dependence, and scale, test, questionnaire, tool, assessment and inventory.
Forty-five tools assessing Internet addiction were identified, of which only
seventeen had been evaluated more than once in terms of their psychometric
properties. Most of the existing scales for Internet addiction require further
validation work but some of them already demonstrate promising psychometric
properties. Given the interest in this phenomenon, it seems important for the
field to promote the use of validated and well-established measures.

Keywords: Internet addiction; Psychometric properties; Review; Scales

The effect of gratifications derived from use of the social networking site
Qzone on Chinese adolescents' positive mood

Drawing from Uses and Gratifications Theory, this study explores the
influence of the gratifications derived from use of the social networking site
Qzone on Chinese adolescents' positive mood. Qzone is the social networking
site that is most preferred and used by Chinese adolescents. Hypothesized
relationships are analyzed by structural equation analysis in a sample of 220
Chinese adolescents aged 14-19 with an online Qzone profile. Gratifications
that Chinese adolescents receive from use of the online social network Qzone,
such as socializing, information-seeking, and entertainment are found to have a
significantly positive influence on their positive mood. Findings of this study
extend the existing theoretical framework on the application of the Uses and
Gratifications Theory to social networking sites. In addition, findings are in
line with those of a number of authors who suggest that social networking site
use may have positive consequences for teenagers. Theoretical and practical
implications are discussed.

In this empirical paper we investigate how much users of Online Social
Networks know about their self-disclosures. We conducted standardized
interviews in which we asked students in what Facebook profile categories they
had disclosed information and to which audience they had made each piece of
information visible. Additionally we collected ratings on how confident
students were about the correctness of their answers. Subsequently students
logged into their Facebook accounts to let us check the correctness of their
assumptions. Results show that students knew fairly well if they had disclosed
information in a category, but not to which audience it was visible.
Furthermore, students had difficulties to accurately judge their own knowledge,
indicating a metacognitive deficit with regard to their own privacy management
in Online Social Networks.

With the recent and dramatic changes to communication patterns introduced by
new information technologies it is increasingly important to understand how
deception is produced in new media. In the present study we investigate
deception production in text messaging, focusing on how often people lie, about
what and to whom. This study uses a novel data collection method that allows
for the examination of individuals' communication records at the message level,
which may provide a more accurate account of deception behavior than diary or
survey methods. We find that the majority of our participants practiced
deception in text messaging. Although lying was a relatively infrequent
occurrence for the majority of our participants, there were a small number of
prolific liars who told a disproportionately large number of lies using this
medium. Additionally, we found some support for the argument that deception
occurs less frequently in closer relationships, and we observed how the
micro-coordination goals of text messaging change the properties of deceptive
text messages relative to face-to-face lies.

Social network sites (SNSs) and mobile phones are becoming increasingly
important in teenagers' lives. Using data collected from a nationally
representative survey (N = 800), this study explores the variation of social
capital by SNS adoption, different SNS activities, and mobile personal talk
among teenagers. The results indicate that SNS adoption and mobile personal
talk can not only enhance teenagers' close ties with friends, but also jointly
promote teenagers' civic engagement. Among SNS users, mobile personal talk also
increase teens' network capital. Different SNS activities such as commenting on
friend's Facebook pictures and joining Facebook groups have different
relationships with social capital, and such relationships are moderated by
mobile personal talk.

Nearly 6000 adults from 7 countries participated in an online survey about
what other activities they engaged in while taking the survey and how
distracted they felt. Younger people were more likely than older ones to engage
in electronic and non-electronic multitasking. Engaging in a wider range of
tasks was associated with feeling more distracted. However, once the variety of
tasks was taken into account, interruptions associated with checking or talking
on one's phone made participants feel less distracted. The relationship between
age, multitasking, and feeling distraction was curvilinear, with middle-aged
respondents being more affected by multitasking than either younger or older
survey takers. The findings suggest that people of all ages are often
deliberate multitaskers who choose their distractions intentionally, at least
some of the time. This bodes well for researchers seeking to administer online
surveys, because it suggests that survey takers will set themselves up with the
type and amount of distractions they are comfortable with. The finding that a
high degree of electronic multitasking may decrease the perception of
distraction should be followed by experiments verifying if this perception
corresponds to actual task performance.

Since their inception in the 1990s, blogs continue to play a major role in
online culture, having increased fivefold in the last six years. Blogs may
serve unique functions for individuals with higher levels of attachment
avoidance and anxiety. The study tests a theoretically grounded mediational
model of the associations between attachment anxiety and avoidance with the
outcome variable of blogging intensity. Desired anonymity and motivations for
blogging are proposed to mediate that relationship. One hundred and forty-three
adult bloggers completed online questionnaires that contained standard measures
of attachment anxiety and avoidance (ECR; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998)
and measures of blogging behavior developed for the study. Path analysis was
used to test the meditational model. The meditational hypotheses were partially
supported. Attachment anxiety was related to greater blogging intensity, and
personal and interpersonal motivational factors mediated this relationship.
Attachment avoidance was associated with lower levels of blogging intensity and
higher levels of anonymity, but anonymity did not mediate the relationship
between attachment avoidance and blogging intensity. The findings suggest that
attachment offers a useful lens for understanding online behavior and how it
meets interpersonal needs.

Keywords: Blog; Attachment; Facebook; Internet; Anxiety; Avoidance

Cyberbullying among high school students in Japan: Development and
validation of the Online Disinhibition Scale

Recent research has revealed some factors that contribute to cyberbullying,
but the role of online disinhibition remains an area for further clarification.
This study examined online disinhibition and cyberbullying behavior among
Japanese adolescents. A sample of 887 high school students (mean age 16.31)
were administered a survey about their cyberbullying experience. The
questionnaire included the Online Disinhibition Scale (ODS), a new 11 item
instrument developed to assess online disinhibition levels. In order to
validate ODS, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor
analysis (CFA) were conducted. EFA yielded two factors subsequently named
"benign disinhibition" and "toxic disinhibition". Results from CFA supported
the two factor solution as an acceptable model fit. Logistic regression
analyses showed that online disinhibition was significantly associated with
cyberbullying.

We investigated how manipulating self and opponent avatar weight (normal vs.
obese) affected people's physical activity in real life as they played an
exergame. While playing virtual tennis, female players operating a normal
weight self avatar were more physically active relative to those using an obese
self avatar. Participants physically exerted themselves the most when both self
and opponent had normal weight avatars, implying increased physical activity
when self and opponent avatars look equally fit. The study also identified
conditions that discouraged physical activity (e.g., normal weight self avatar
vs. an obese opponent). The findings were congruent with priming and social
comparison models, and illustrated how virtual social cues can be leveraged to
influence health behaviors via exergames.

This study investigates the way children categorize different robots and
their preferences for certain robots. For this aim, a matching pictures game in
which 6 social robots are to be matched to one of the categories: machines,
humans, animals and toys, was developed and implemented on a tablet device. A
mixed factorial design with one within-subjects variable (type of robots) and
two between-subjects variables (type of development and gender) was used. The
data suggest that both TD and ASD children perceive robots mainly as toys,
while children with ASD also perceive robots as machines. A high diversity of
preferences for different robots was revealed, but also a high preference for
simplified designs, with exaggerated facial features. This study provides an
innovative instrument for studying children's perception about social robots,
and offers valuable information, with implications on the design of social
robots.

Keywords: Assistive robots; Perception; Appearance; Autism; Children

Social impacts in social media: An examination of perceived truthfulness and
sharing of information

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media display the combined opinion of
users as collective opinion. The purpose of the work reported here was to
examine how collective opinion might influence the perceived truthfulness and
the sharing likelihood of health-related statements on social media. Experiment
1 revealed that, when evaluating the truthfulness of a statement, participants
adopted the collective truthfulness rating associated with the statement.
Similarly, Experiment 2 showed that the likelihood that participants would
share a statement followed the collective sharing likelihood associated with
the statement. These social impacts were extensive, taking place for statements
perceived as true, debatable, and false. These results contribute new insights
into how people perceive and share information on social media as well as how
collective opinion might affect the quality of information on social media.

The digital world, and the Internet in particular, have a significant impact
on almost all aspects of our lives. The realm of psychotherapy is an area in
which the influence of the Internet is growing rapidly. This paper suggests a
model for comprehensive online therapy online with a therapist at its center.
We start by explaining the main components of both traditional therapy and
online therapy. We discuss the principal criticisms leveled against online
therapy and assess the efficacy of various responses. The paper moves on to
explain the advantages of online therapy, focusing on the unique aspects of
this approach. The paper proposes that online therapy should exploit other
online resources, including online techniques for information gathering. This
is true both in the therapeutic session and outside of it. In addition, the
paper suggests that therapists incorporate online role play, online CBT and
intervention techniques using the smartphone. All of these tools are suggested
as important components in a process of comprehensive therapy run by a
therapist working online.

Keywords: Internet; E-therapy; Clinical psychology

Does social capital affect SNS usage? A look at the roles of subjective
well-being and social identity

This study views social capital as a precursor of SNS (Social Network
Service) use, which departs from the previous thoughts that considered social
capital as the outcome of SNS activities. Drawing upon the theoretical premises
regarding network-based social capital, this study examines the roles of
subjective well-being and social identity in terms of their moderating as well
as mediating influences on SNS use. This study sought to sub-categorize social
capital and SNS use with a view to providing more refined theoretical and
practical implications. The study's main objectives are three-fold: First, the
study verifies whether social capital, categorized into bridging and bonding
capital, influences one's SNS use as measured by qualitative use and
quantitative use. Second, the study aims to confirm whether subjective
well-being mediates between social capital and SNS use. Third, it examines
whether social identity moderates the relationship between social capital and
SNS use.
The study result indicates that bridging capital only had a significant
impact on qualitative use. However, subjective well-being did not mediate the
relationship between social capital and SNS use. Finally, the cognitive
identity caused significant difference in the effect of social capital on
quantitative SNS use, whereas cognitive and affective identities caused
significant differences in regards to the effects of bridging capital on
qualitative SNS use.

Keywords: Social capital; Bridging; Bonding; Subjective well-being; Social identity; Social network service

Pathological video game playing in Spanish and British adolescents: Towards
the exploration of Internet Gaming Disorder symptomatology

Research into problematic video gaming has increased greatly over the last
decade and many screening instruments have been developed to identify such
behaviour. This study re-examined the Problematic Videogame Playing [PVP]
Scale. The objectives of the study were to (i) examine its psychometric
properties in two European countries, (ii) estimate the prevalence of potential
pathological gaming among adolescents in both countries, and (iii) assess the
classification accuracy of the PVP Scale based on its symptomatology as a way
of exploring its relationship with both the behavioural component model of
addiction and the proposed Internet Gaming Disorder. The data were collected
via a survey administered to 2356 adolescents aged between 11 and 18 years from
Spain (n = 1132) and Great Britain (n = 1224). Results indicated that the
reliability of both versions was adequate, and the factorial and construct
validity were good. Findings also showed that the prevalence of pathological
gamers estimated with a rigorous cut-off point was 7.7% for Spanish and 14.6%
for British adolescents. The scale showed adequate sensitivity, specificity and
classification accuracy in both countries, and was able to differentiate
between social and potential pathological gamers, and from their addictive
symptomatology. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Advertisement choice is an online marketing technique where viewers of
videotaped content are allowed to choose the advertisement they want to watch
during a commercial break. The purpose of this study was to examine how this
choice influenced viewers' expectations of the content they were about to
witness. Two hundred seventy-one students participated in a between-participant
quasi-experimental study. After watching a YouTube video, one group of
participants chose to watch a MP3 advertisement instead of an advertisement for
a digital camera. The other group of participants was not given a choice and
watched the same advertisement. Participants' expectations were measured using
six 7-point Likert items. The results of the study found that participants who
chose to watch the MP3 option had significantly higher expectations of the
upcoming advertisement than the participants who did not get a choice. These
results parallel previous findings for female but not male online viewers. As a
result, female viewers may go through a different series of cognitive processes
when encountering advertisement choice compared to their male counterparts.
Regardless of any cognitive differences, increases in advertisement
expectations could potentially influence other important online marketing
outcomes such as advertisement avoidance behaviors.

The goal of this paper is to study how people do relational reasoning, such
as selecting the grade of all students in a class with GPA (Grade Point
Average) greater than 3.5. Literature in the field of psychology of human
reasoning offer little insight as to how people solve relational problems. We
present two studies that look at human performance in relational problems that
use basic relational operators. Our results present the first evidence toward
the role of problem complexity on performance as determined by the accuracy and
discrimination rates. We also look at the role of familiarity with tabular
representation of information, as found in spreadsheets for example, and other
factors for relational reasoning, and show that familiarity does not play a
significant role in determining performance in relational problem solving,
which we found counterintuitive.

The aim of this study was to identify factors that are related to pupils'
ICT self-efficacy. More specifically, a multilayered framework was used to
identify which pupil, classroom and school level factors are associated with
primary school pupils' self-perceived competence in digital information
processing and communication. Information on pupils' ICT self-efficacy and the
pupil level factors was gathered through a questionnaire administered to 2421
sixth grade pupils (and their parents) in 92 Flemish primary schools. A
questionnaire was also administered to the teachers (n = 141) and the schools'
ICT coordinators (n = 86) in order to gather information on classroom and
school level factors. The results of the multilevel analysis indicate that ICT
self-efficacy can be considered as a pupil, rather than a class or school,
phenomenon. The results indicate that the pupil level factors ICT experience,
ICT attitude, parental ICT attitude, controlling learning style, analytic
intelligence and amotivation, are related to primary school pupils' ICT
self-efficacy.

We conducted three studies to understand how online emotional disclosure is
influenced by social network structure on Facebook. Results showed that
emotional disclosure was associated with both the density and size of users'
personal networks. Facebook users with denser networks disclosed more positive
and negative emotions, and the relation between network density and emotional
disclosure was mediated by stronger need for emotional expression. Facebook
users with larger networks on Facebook disclosed more positive emotions, and
the relation between network size and emotional disclosure was mediated by a
stronger need for impression management. Our study extends past research by
revealing the psychological mechanisms through which personal social network
structure influences emotional disclosure. It suggests that social network size
and density are associated with different psychological needs, which in turn
lead to different patterns of emotional disclosure.

The benefits of introducing educational video games in the classroom are
many. Due to the widely available number and sizes of screens, and the learning
outcomes shown by the Interpersonal Computer make this an emerging technology
that should be considered for the classroom, technology that shares display
characteristics with tabletops. An important factor to consider in this sort of
technology is the position and amount of information displayed. The purpose of
this research is to study the effect of the position on the screen of displayed
information and the amount of information received by each of the students who
share the workspace with respect to the acquired knowledge. We learned that
students that worked with more objects and had more neighbors improved
significantly less in their learning, a result that can be explained through
the Cognitive Load Theory.

This study examined whether exposure to sexualized media influences the
subconscious process of attention allocation to subsequently encountered
stimuli. One hundred twenty-three participants (61 females) between 18 and 23
years (Mage = 19.99 years) watched a 3-min video clip containing either
neutral, sexually more explicit, or sexually less explicit imagery, before
completing a dot detection task measuring selective attention for explicitly
displayed sexual stimuli and a word search task measuring attention toward
hidden sexual cues. Results of the dot detection task indicated that
participants in all conditions were slower to detect the dot in trials
including sexual stimuli, suggesting absorption by these stimuli. Results of
the word search task indicated that participants in the two sexual video
conditions, compared to participants in the neutral video condition, were
quicker to detect a sexual word in the matrix, albeit only if they completed
this task before the dot detection task. There were no differences in the
number of sexual words found between video conditions. Our findings point out
the importance of studying effects of sexualized media exposure on subconscious
cognitive processes in young people, as such effects can provide us insights
into how sexualized media content is processed and how sexual schemas are
formed and strengthened.

In this research, we present the concept of Hyperaudio as non-linear
presentation of auditory information in the context of underlying theoretical
assumptions of how Hyperaudio differs from existing non-linear information
media. We present a study comparing text and auditory represented information
either in a linear or non-linear manner and the interaction of these
presentation formats with different underlying text types. Learners had to
learn from two different text sorts either from text only in linear or
non-linear manner from a computer screen or the same information presented as
audio files also presented either in linear or non-linear manner. Results show
overall advantages of linear information presentation compared with non-linear
information presentation, and the advantages of written text versus auditory
text on learning performance assessed with an essay task and a multiple-choice
test. Interaction effects indicate that non-linearity increases cognitive load
assessed with a self-report measure in auditory instruction compared to linear
information presentation while cognitive load in processing written text is not
affected by linearity. Further, effects reveal that the text type (ex-pository
vs. linear text type) interacts with presentation format showing that
expository text leads to comparable learning outcomes in linear and non-linear
formats, while presenting linear text type as hypertext or Hyperaudio is here
rather unbeneficial.

Keywords: Hypermedia; Mobile learning; Hyperaudio

Mapping virtual communities by their visual productions: The example of the
Second Life Steampunk community

In the digital age, the identities and structures of virtual communities
develop outside the traditional definitions of geography and physical
constraints. Among the best models to study the identification process in
virtual communities are the communities of fans of imaginary universes.
Steampunk -- neo-Victorian fiction with a science fiction twist -- has for
instance given rise to a large community, which is very active both in real
life and in virtual spaces, for instance in the online 3D immersive platform
Second Life. By collecting and analysing hundreds of visual artifacts generated
by members of the steampunk community of Second Life, we found a repertoire of
visual and lexical characteristics with which to identify the community. In
addition, examining the characteristics displayed by visual productions from
other communities allowed us to map relationships between different communities
based on their aesthetics. This data suggests that the quantification of visual
clues points out to interlocking relationships between different community
aesthetics, forming a network where differences are visible, but fluidity still
dominates. Furthermore, our results could serve as a model to study how
communities in different media (immersive universes, games, social media based
on visual materials such as Pinterest or Instagram) generate their own visual
identity.

Mixed-mode questionnaires are increasingly used in research. Psychological
measures, developed for paper-and-pencil (paper) administration require
measurement equivalence testing when administered in an alternative mode. Here,
Icelandic translations of the NEO-FFI personality measure and Adult Reading
History Questionnaire (ARHQ) were tested for equivalence of measurement and
data quality between paper and web mode. Perceived sensitivity of data and
preference for survey mode were also assessed. One hundred adults were
recruited to answer both modes in a randomized, crossover design. Eighty-eight
participants completed both administrations with an average of 63.8 days (SD =
2.2) between them. Within-subjects comparisons of means between modes
demonstrated measurement equivalence for both measures. However, differing
invalidity coefficients by mode observed by multi-trait multi method (MTMM)
analysis suggested systematic effects not captured by traditional psychometric
evaluation. Of note was a greater tendency for acquiescence responding to the
NEO-FFI observed in web mode. Neither personality traits nor ARHQ reading
difficulty scores were associated with preference for survey mode. However, 36%
of participants who considered their personality data moderately to highly
sensitive scored higher in neuroticism and lower in agreeableness compared to
those rating their personality data of low sensitivity.
While the Icelandic NEO-FFI and ARHQ have demonstrated measurement
equivalence in paper and web mode, mode equivalence of psychometric measures
may require ongoing evaluation as perceptions of web privacy continue to
evolve.

Risks associated with adolescents' uses of social networking sites (SNSs)
propelled investigations concerning how online privacy and security behaviors
are related to young people's general activities online. To explore
adolescents' SNS behaviors, among a group of 531 volunteered adolescent
participants during their junior or senior middle school years in Beijing, this
study ran exploratory factor analysis based on statements from non-structured
interview targeting their Renren SNS uses, and further investigated the levels
of and the associations between SNS behaviors based on developmental factors of
age, gender, personality, and attachment styles. Results suggest most Chinese
younger and older adolescents were likely disclosing real names and photos on
SNSs, and their latent utilization, socializing, and privacy disclosure SNS
behaviors were influenced by age, gender, personality, or attachment styles.
Moreover, the negative associations of privacy disclosure with utilization or
socializing behaviors were likely affected by personality and attachment
categories. Although Chinese adolescents showed some levels of concerns in
their SNS privacy disclosure, education of SNS privacy and security along with
adolescent care in general are perhaps helpful for providing a better online
experience for young people.

From a liberal perspective, pluralism and viewpoint diversity are seen as a
necessary condition for a well-functioning democracy. Recently, there have been
claims that viewpoint diversity is diminishing in online social networks,
putting users in a "bubble", where they receive political information which
they agree with. The contributions from our investigations are fivefold: (1) we
introduce different dimensions of the highly complex value viewpoint diversity
using political theory; (2) we provide an overview of the metrics used in the
literature of viewpoint diversity analysis; (3) we operationalize new metrics
using the theory and provide a framework to analyze viewpoint diversity in
Twitter for different political cultures; (4) we share our results for a case
study on minorities we performed for Turkish and Dutch Twitter users; (5) we
show that minorities cannot reach a large percentage of Turkish Twitter users.
With the last of these contributions, using theory from communication scholars
and philosophers, we show how minority access is missing from the typical
dimensions of viewpoint diversity studied by computer scientists and the impact
it has on viewpoint diversity analysis.

In recent years, the design and deployment of persuasive interventions for
inducing sustainable urban mobility behaviors has become a very active research
field, leveraging on the pervasive usage of social media and mobile apps by
citizens in their daily life. Several challenges in designing and assessing
motivational features for effective and long-lasting behavior change in this
area have also been identified, such as the focus of most solutions on
targeting and prescribing individual (versus collective) mobility choices, as
well as a general lack of large-scale evaluations on the impact of these
solutions on citizens' life. This paper reports lessons learnt from three
parallel and complementary user studies, where motivational features for
sustainable urban mobility, including social influence strategies delivered
through social media, were prototyped, tested and refined. By reflecting on our
results and design experiences so far, we aim to provide better guidance for
future development of more effective solutions supporting citizens' adoption of
sustainable mobility behaviors in urban settings.

Social media is international: users from different cultures and language
backgrounds are generating and sharing content. But language barriers emerge in
the communication landscape online. In the quest for language diversity and
universal access, the vision of a cosmopolitan Internet has stumbled over the
language frontier.
In the microblogging site Twitter, information spreads across languages and
countries. Expatriates, minorities, diaspora communities, and language learners
play an important role in forming transnational networks, creating social ties
across borders. This research investigates how multilingual users of Twitter
mediate between language groups in their social network, focusing on social
connections and language choice.
This research contributes an original classification of network types based
on the patterns of connections between language groups within the social
networks of multilingual users. Also, it applies the novel idea of modeling the
influence of network factors in the language choices of the user. The results
can inform the design of social media platforms seeking to foster global
connectivity and international communication flows.

Digital voting is used to support group decision-making in a variety of
contexts ranging from politics to mundane everyday collaboration, and the rise
in popularity of digital voting has provided an opportunity to re-envision
voting as a social tool that better serves democracy. A key design goal for any
group decision-making system is the promotion of participation, yet there is
little research that explores how the features of digital voting systems
themselves can be shaped to configure participation appropriately. In this
paper we propose a framework that explores the design space of digital voting
from the perspective of participation. We ground our discussion in the design
of a social media polling tool called BallotShare; a first instantiation of our
proposed framework designed to facilitate the study of decision-making
practices in a workplace environment. Across five weeks, participants created
and took part in non-standard polls relating to events and other spontaneous
group decisions. Following interviews with participants we identified
significant drivers and limitations of individual and collective participation
in the voting process: social visibility, social inclusion, commitment and
delegation, accountability, influence and privacy.

Positive health behaviour by eating nutritious foods and performing physical
activity has been shown to have significant benefit. Furthermore, theoretical
models show that social factors contribute to health behaviour. However, social
technology for health behaviour has provided limited social interaction. This
paper presents an online social network for health behaviour change called
VivoSpace that was designed from a theoretical foundation. The results from a
field study (n = 35) are presented that include participants from both clinical
and non-clinical settings. The results show that there was a significant change
in some of the individual determinants for health behaviour change; however,
social determinants did not change. Furthermore, the social features such as
commenting were under utilized. Two follow-up focus groups (n = 7 and 8) were
conducted to determine how the design should be iterated to increase
socialization on VivoSpace. The results suggest that the posts need to add
interest through system intelligence and allowing the user to add photos and
other information to the post.

This paper explores students' perceptions of creativity in learning
Information Technology (IT) in project groups and the implications of better
educating creative IT students for the future. Theoretically, the extension of
social psychology research into creativity lays the basis of bringing
creativity, learning and IT education into one framework. Empirically,
qualitative interviews were carried out with 48 students from three
disciplines, including Computer Science (n = 16), Electronic Systems (n = 15)
and Medialogy (n = 17) at Aalborg University (AAU) in Denmark, which has a
tradition of using problem-based learning (PBL) in student project groups.
According to the findings, the students' perceptions of creativity reflect
their domain-related conceptualization and tacit learning experience, with
different levels of confidence of being creative persons. As IT plays multiple
roles in developing students' creativity, it can be regarded as a 'learning
partner'. This implies that in the future creativity should be taught more
explicitly, helping students to become creative IT talents as a part of their
professional identity. It also requires teaching efforts to build a learning
environment that stimulates creativity more effectively through more
interactions between learners, learning tasks and learning tools.

With the development of internet technology, professional virtual community
(PVC) is becoming the valuable external knowledge source for graduate students.
Students search information and knowledge in specific domain, share research
experiences and weave their social network in these professional virtual
communities (PVCs). How to use PVC to increase graduate students' creativity
should be an important researching issue. Although students' online behaviors
have got researchers' attention, students' PVC behaviors and their impacts on
creativity keeps less comprehensively understood. The empirically analysis of
totally 930 graduate students in this study turns out that graduate students'
PVC behaviors include 17 categories which then are clustered into three
dimensions: Knowledge & Networking Behavior, Behave Manner and
Interactivity. To test their impacts on graduate students' creativity, the
regression results demonstrate that after controlling students' intrinsic
motivation and creative self-efficacy, Knowledge & Network Behavior and
Behavior Manner both significantly predict students' creativity. However
Interactivity does not affect students' creativity. Implications and future
research are discussed.

This study explored factors that affect consumer acceptance of e-book use by
applying a model that incorporates the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as the
theoretical basis of the hypotheses. The model differentiated external factors
-- compatibility, relative advantage, self-efficacy, and subjective norms --
from internal factors -- perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness,
satisfaction with e-book usage, and intention to continue using e-books. The
study (n = 1030) found statistically significant support for the hypothesized
model, indicating that the tested relationships between the revised TAM and
user intention to continue using e-books were positive and statistically
significant. The study's findings provide potentially significant implications
that can be used to develop guidelines and a framework for assessing e-book
users' behavior.

Keywords: College Students; E-book; TRA; TPB; TAM; DIT

Exploring students learning behavior with an interactive etextbook in
computer science courses

We present empirical findings from using an interactive electronic textbook
(eTextbook) system named OpenDSA to teach sophomore- and junior-level Computer
Science courses. The web-based eTextbook infrastructure allows us to collect
large amounts of data that can provide detailed information about students'
study behavior. In particular we were interested in seeing if the students will
attempt to manipulate the electronic resources so as to receive credit without
deeply going through the materials. We found that a majority of students do not
read the text. On the other hand, we found evidence that students voluntarily
complete additional exercises (after obtaining credit for completion) as a
study aid prior to exams. We determined that visualization use was fairly high
(even when credit for their completion was not offered). Skipping to the end of
slideshows was more common when credit for their completion was offered, but
also occurred when it was not. We measured the level of use of mobile devices
for learning by CS students. Almost all students did not associate their mobile
devices with studying. The only time they accessed OpenDSA from a mobile device
was for a quick look up, and never for in depth study.

Previous studies on learning challenges in the field of modeling focus on
cognitive perspectives, such as model understanding, modeling language
knowledge and perceptual properties of graphical notation by novice business
analysts as major sources affecting model quality. In the educational context
outcome feedback is usually applied to improve learning achievements. However,
not many research publications have been written observing the characteristics
of a modeling process itself that can be associated with better/worse learning
outcomes, nor have any empirically validated results been reported on the
observations of modeling activities in the educational context. This paper
attempts to cover this gap for conceptual modeling. We analyze modeling
behavior (conceptual modeling event data of 20 cases, 10.000 events in total)
using experimental logging functionality of the JMermaid modeling tool and
process mining techniques. The outcomes of the work include modeling patterns
that are indicative for worse/better learning performance. The results
contribute to (1) improving teaching guidance for conceptual modeling targeted
at process-oriented feedback, (2) providing recommendations on the type of data
that can be useful in observing a modeling behavior from the perspective of
learning outcomes. In addition, the study provides first insights for learning
analytics research in the domain of conceptual modeling.

Flow has been identified as a desirable phenomenon because it can lead to a
favorable attitude toward specific information technologies. In the present
study, we argue that it can also result in potential adverse consequences such
as Internet addiction. Based on the flow theory, the present study examines the
dual effects of flow experience on high school students' Internet addiction and
exploratory behavior. The present study also examines the effects of parental
interventions on the dual causal processes. A research model was developed and
empirically tested on data collected from 1203 high school students in central
China. The structural equation modeling analysis demonstrates that flow
experience has positive impacts on both high school students' Internet
addiction and exploratory behavior. In addition, parental support significantly
lessens high school students' Internet addiction and enhances their exploratory
behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

Current research on computerized learning has steered toward combining
personalized e-learning with an affective tutoring system (ATS) to enable
assisted teaching and strengthen students' learning effectiveness. This study
develops a novel ATS which includes four modules: affective recognition
(combines facial emotion recognition and semantic emotion recognition), tutor
agent, content, and instruction strategies for examining the influence of ATS
in Accounting remedial instruction on learning effectiveness and usability.
Triangulation research methods -- quantitative data (questionnaire survey and
score) and qualitative data (participant observation and interview) have
adopted in this study to evaluate the students' learning performance and system
usability. This study recruited 80 students (40 students for traditional
teaching group, 40 students for ATS group) from a technology university in
Southern Taiwan who attained low academic achievements in Accounting and
possess business backgrounds. The research results revealed that the benefits
of using the ATS for Account remedial curriculum are good usability of system
and high learning performance. Finally, we proposed several prospects for
future study.

This study explored the relationships between identity, science learning,
and gaming. A survey of 1502 teenagers assessed gaming preferences, habits,
science learning, science and gamer identities. Hierarchical regression
analyses revealed that enjoyment of problem-solving games and identifying as a
gamer were the strongest predictors for teens' science understanding. Teen
preferences for games with science-related features, and competence in
problem-solving games were significant predictors of teens' understanding of
science. Teens who preferred collaborative social games over science-oriented
games were less likely to understand the nature of science. Teens with a
stronger science identity were more likely to negatively evaluate their gaming
groups, preferred problem-solving games, and claimed greater competence in
games with science-related features when compared to those who do not
self-identify as science thinkers. Results suggest that games that seek to
support those who do not feel successful in science learning should focus on
social interaction and involve activities and experiences that could be
utilized in the real world rather than problem solving games. Results suggest
that science-focused games may reinforce perceived self-efficacy and sense of
competence in real world scientific reasoning situations for those already
predisposed to feel confident as science thinkers.

This study compared students' group work experiences in virtual and blended
classes in an EFL context. The study was conducted during an academic semester
and the participants comprised of two groups of Iranian EAP students in
mainstream education system and virtual education context. To probe the factors
influencing student group work experiences and how these factors might affect
student performances in virtual and blended environments, we adopted a
mixed-method approach. For the collection of quantitative data, a survey
adapted from Smith et al. (2011) was used. For further investigation, data were
gathered through comments the participants made, semi-structured interviews,
and teacher observations. The findings revealed that students in the virtual
class proved significantly more enthusiastic about collaborative work compared
to students in the blended class. Our analysis of qualitative data confirmed
that anticipation of problems and development of communication plans were found
in the learners in the virtual group, whereas personality clashes were commonly
observed among the learners in the blended environment. The results promise
implications for teachers in order to identify challenges the English learners
may face in online instructional environments and think of strategies to help
them overcome problems and engage in active participation in online activities.

Collaborative learning encloses a diversity of activities, interactions, and
practices. Thus, designing a learning environment, potentially enhanced with
technology, to support collaborative learning, is not an easy task. Using an
in-class exploration involving four multidisciplinary teams, this research
seeks to understand collaborative design activities within "InfoSpace" -- an
information ecology. That is, a collocated space enriched with a multiple
interlinked heterogeneous technologies. The aim of the study is to explore how
an information ecology works as an integrated cognitive system, through the
lenses of distributed cognition. Through the analysis we constructed a detailed
account of the information flow, physical layout and artefact models. We claim
that distributed cognition framework can provide a lens for understanding
interactions among learners, tasks, and tools in collocated technology enhanced
learning environments. Furthermore, the analysis provides valuable insights on
how the design of the information ecology supports collaboration and
coordination.